The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

An e-book veteran looks at the past, present, and future of the business.

I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet's nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of "the world's largest e-book store."

Unfortunately, despite starting the company near the peak of the original dot-com bubble, the founders of Peanut Press lost control of the company very early on. In retrospect, this signaled an important truth that persists to this day: people don't get e-books.

A succession of increasingly disengaged and (later) incompetent owners effectively killed Peanut Press, first flattening its growth curve, then abandoning all of the original employees by moving the company several hundred miles away. In January of 2008, what remained of the once-proud e-book store (now called eReader.com) was scraped up off the floor and acquired by a competitor, Fictionwise.com.

Unlike previous owners, Fictionwise has some actual knowledge of and interest in e-books. But though the "world's largest e-book store" appellation still adorns the eReader.com website, larger fish have long since entered the pond.

And so, a sad end for the eReader that I knew (née Palm Digital Media, née Peanut Press). But this story is not just about them, or me. Notice that I used the present tense earlier: "people don't get e-books." This is as true today as it was ten years ago. Venture capitalists didn't get it then, nor did the series of owners that killed Peanut Press, nor do many of the players in the e-book market today. And then there are the consumers, their own notions about e-books left to solidify in the absence of any clear vision from the industry.

The sentiment seeping through the paragraphs above should seem familiar to most Ars Technica readers. Do you detect a faint whiff of OS/2? Amiga, perhaps? Or, more likely, the overwhelming miasma of "Mac user, circa 1996." That's right, it's the defiance and bitterness of the marginalized: those who feel that their particular passion has been unjustly shunned by the ignorant masses.

Usually, this sentiment marks the tail end of a movement, or a product in decline. But sometimes it's just a sign of a slow start. I believe this is the case with e-books. The pace of the e-book market over the past decade has been excruciatingly—and yes, you guessed it, unjustly—slow. My frustration is much like that of the Mac users of old. Here's an awesome, obvious, inevitable idea, seemingly thwarted at every turn by widespread consumer misunderstanding and an endemic lack of will among the big players.

I don't pretend to be able to move corporate mountains, but I do have a lot of e-book related things to get off my chest. And so, this will be part editorial, part polemic, part rant, but also, I hope, somewhat educational. As for Apple, that connection will be clear by the end, if it isn't already. Buckle up.

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.